James McNeill Whistler

We were in DC for a couples of days and me and the boys walked down a couple of miles to the Freer  Gallery to see the Peacock room.  First time for them.  And I was amazed once again at this fabulous work by James Whistler.

The room is now covered with Charles Freer's magnificent collection of pottery, which seems to me to be every bit as fitting as the blue and white of Leyton.  The gold peacocks stare out in their magnificent setting, and at the opposite end of this room is one of the most beautiful pieces of long narrow white pottery I have ever seen.  It is apparently a very very old piece of Chinese work.

When we regretfully left that room we wandered through a lovely exhibit of his early work, with pencil drawings and etchings holding their own next to searingly  beautiful paintings.

The next day we were at Utrecht's and I met a guy who works at the Phillips Collection.  And of course we had to go there.  My favorite Museum I've ever seen.  And it didn't disappoint me, in fact I was shocked at how much better it looked.  Everyone there, Paul Klee, Kandinsky,  Arthur Dove, Augustus Tack and Albert Ryder looked more amazing, more personal than any reproduction I've seen.

And now they have a nice cafe downstairs and we were able to rest there for about a half hour before heading to the guitar store on Connecticut, the only one left in the city.

Now we are home in my clutter of papers and books, endless scraps I find in the house, either delivered by the post office or brought in from the grocery store, and I am humbled in my work, as I am filled with admiration of those painters, especially as I don't think of them as often as I would wish to.

Thank god my wife allows me to fill the tables with all this trash.  I hope to clear it out, if it would only stop arriving.  It comes in on apples, bananas, as envelopes, stamps, loud advertising, sincere pleas for money, as cardboard around books, tags off clothing.  I feel its hold and have to use it all.

Whistler

She packed all his manuscripts (and carbon copies) and set off only to have the suitcase stolen at the train station.

Hemingway comforted his wife over the loss, yet decades later he recalled the pain and utter heartbreak of losing hid early writings.  It was so severe, he said, that he had to "put it out of mind almost with surgery."

When I am traveling by carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep;  it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly. -Wolfgang Mozart

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.  -James Whistler

To say to †he painter nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the piano player that he may sit on the piano. -James Whistler

father

I'm still working on the bigger ones, but then these sneak in there...and they drive me crazy.  First writing anything can always take forever, and writing about your father is never easy...

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us.  We are formed by scraps of wisdom.  -Umberto eco

The father who would taste the essence of fatherhood must turn back from the plane of his experience, take with him the fruits of his journey and begin again beside his child, marching step by step over the same old road. -Angelo Patri

My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me. -Jim Valvano

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.  -Mark Twain

the long one: albatross map

Now this next batch may take some time.  And they are all large.  And they are all contiguous.  Maybe I will take some time out to make some smaller ones though.  We'll see when we get there.

Of course you don't know what size this one is cause they're all the same size right no matter what unless I take the picture in a room our something. 22x30. And this would be the last one if we are moving forward, or the first one if we move backward.   And I think there will be about eleven of them in one giant roll.

Pissarro

When Pissarro returned to to his home in Louveciennes in the summer of 1871, the Germans, having defeated the French and briefly occupies Paris, also looted his studio, leaving only about 40 out of 1500 canvases, which the artist had stored there. -Herman J Wechsler

-the result of a lifetime of work.  Very little of his production had ever been sold.  He was told how the invaders had used his canvases as shoes to protect their feet from the mud. -H.W.

The next years were consumed with hard work, were rich in Production, and some of the century's most poetic landscapes were being turned out.  -H.W.

Not enough of these were selling, however, to keep the maker from becoming more and more bitter and all but ready to admit complete defeat.  -H.W.

During his lifetime Pissaro received few honors.  In his last letter to his son Lucien, he writes:

I sold two pictures to the Museum and two to collectors, but I am hardly besieged by demands.  I see that we are far from being understood -quite far -even by our friends. H.W.